 The story I'm going to tell today is about Gondoi. That's our language name for what the non-indigenous people call cassowary. Well my name is Leonard Andy and I'm a Juru traditional owner of the Mission Beach area. We have a story of him being a man. And as a man he wasn't very nice or good. He was always stealing other people's food and not listening to all the elders and what they were doing. And because he used to wander around a lot in the bush he had a lot of lice in his hair. And the women said, oh, we'll fix this guy up. So they went and had a meeting with the men. And what they did was they cooked him up a big feed and they invited him over to have a feed and after he had a feed they said, oh, if you lay down we'll go through your hair and take out all the lice. And when he was laying down they were going through these hair and a couple of men came with stone axes from behind him while he laid down and cut off his arms. And they said that when he jumped up and ran into the forest he started to change and turn into what the Europeans called cassowary. But for us, he's gondoi. All these tall trees are kwandongs. This is a real vegetation area which we planted to rainforest trees after cyclone Yasi in 2011 destroyed the passion fruit orchard. So now we've decided to turn it back into rainforest and it's a mix of pioneer species like the Macaranga, bleeding hearts and also things like cassowary plum which is a rainforest species and cassowaries eat the fruits which are about this big, far too big for any other bird to eat but cassowaries can pick them up and down they go and you can see them go down their throat, the swells as it goes down. It's quite comical watching them eating a cassowary plum. The Queenstown wet tropics area is a strip along the eastern edge of Queenstown and it's more or less parallel to the Great Barrier Reef. I believe it's the only place in the world where there are two world heritage areas sitting side by side. This is agathis rubbuster or kauri pine and the ancestors of this which look almost exactly the same as this tree go back to 175 million years ago. This is really a very special place because over millions of years throughout the ice ages and the changing landscape many species have treated this as a refuge. They've expanded out over the continent and then when conditions have changed and become unfavorable they've contracted and taken refuge in the valleys and the wetter areas of this wet tropics area where we have so many different species enormous biodiversity. There are 1,200 rainforest trees in Australia. In the wet tropics of Queensland you can have a one hectare area with 200 different species of trees which is quite incredible diversity. Although the wet tropics world heritage area is only about 9,000 square kilometres we have 40% of Australia's bird species represented here. A third of all the mammals, mysopials, orchids, conifers we have 50% of Australia's bats and butterflies are represented here and there are 162 reptiles in the wet tropics. They range from a skink that's 4 centimetres long right up to crocodiles that are up to 6 metres long. So there's a great range of both sizes and diversity and they're still discovering insects and reptiles, fish plants that have never been described in science before. One of the species that was part of that is now confined pretty much to the wet tropics area is the cassowary. They're a very colourful and spectacular bird. From records it appears cassowaries have been around for about 30 million years and their lineage you can see when you look at a cassowary if you look closely at the feet and they look so much like the feet of a dinosaur. It's got quite a lot of appeal, it's very photogenic but it's also a keystone species and fundamental to the survival of the rainforest. It disperses at least 60 or 70 species of rainforest trees which are too big for any other birds to disperse and so we call the cassowary a keystone species. It's vital for the survival of the diversity of the forest and to have cassowaries moving around in it. This is bandicoot berry which is a popular cassowary food when they can reach it but the berries fall down when they're ripe eventually like these dark ones fall off and they're quite nutritious for the cassowaries there's quite a lot of flesh in them and a lovely purple colour. So that's typical of the sort of fruits that the cassowaries eat and these produce fruit for at least two or three months of the year. It represents such a fundamental thing about the rainforest if the cassowaries are surviving then the rainforest is surviving and all the other animals and plants and organisms that make up this incredible celebration of life on earth are able to survive. We only have about a fifth of the habitat that was here originally suitable for cassowaries. The remainder has been cleared for farming and housing and that sort of roads and railways and so on. So the population of cassowaries is obviously a lot less than it was in pre-European times. Whether the land has got its carrying capacity of cassowaries now is an open question because you can't fly over the top and see mobs of cassowaries and say, oh, there's 200 there or 300 there. They're solitary and cryptic so they can be in the forest and you can't see them. So it's very, very difficult to count them but some work has been done in recent times using DNA analysis of scats and putting that together with modelling and they've come up with, one of the numbers was 4,200 surviving in all of Australia. The fatalities are mainly on the roads, being hit by cars and killed by dogs. In the vulnerable time when cassowaries are being weaned, that is sent away by their parent, that's the most critical time. The male tends to incubate the eggs and rear the chicks, look after them until they're about a year old and then it's time for them to find their own territory and they're on their own. There's roads with traffic travelling. A lot of places there's an 80 kilometre for our limit, 20 below the normal open road limit, where cassowaries tend to cross the road but even at that speed there are a lot of fatalities from cassowaries crossing the road, mining their own business and all being pursued by other cassowaries and so they burst out in the cross the road without any regard for the noise the vehicle's making. The other issue is that cassowaries that have been fed by people tend to become less shy and also associate people with food and so they'll wander onto the road and expect that where there's a car there's going to be somebody that'll give them food and the local vet says a fed bird is a dead bird. My name is Peter Trott, I'm Secretary of Community for Coastal and Cassowary Conservation, C4. My wife and I have worked in various parts of Australia but we chose to come here to live 14 years ago and since then we became involved with C4. C4 stands for Community for Coastal and Cassowary Conservation. My name is Peter Rolls and I am currently the President of C4. I've been the President since 2015. I've been in C4 on and off since the early 1990s. C4 is a community group that means it's entirely run by volunteers. It was a response to a perceived need to do something about the rapidly declining population of cassowaries. There had been a lot of clearing of lowland rainforest and the cassowary population had sort of been hanging on but was declining. We thought or a number of people thought that possibly the best way to stop the rainforest clearing which is what we really were about was to pick an iconic species like the cassowary and say if we can save enough habitat for cassowaries we can save a lot of forest and a lot of other wildlife for benefit as well. Very early in the piece it was realised that a good way of trying to look after those animals was to put their food back. Putting food for cassowaries back was really pretty easy. People collected cassowary scats because cassowaries are major dispersers of rainforest trees. Collect the cassowary scats, bring them into C4. We'd grow the seeds, make rainforest food plants for the cassowaries and then put them back. First it was back into our own yards, our own properties and then it was a matter of hunting around for other people who would do it and that's continued to grow so that we now are all about looking for land which is not being used any other way productively and can be made back into cassowary habitat. With the fairly extensive clearing of lowland rainforest the cassowaries have been trapped in remnants of forest along the coast in particular. The highest density population of cassowaries is in the lowland rainforest. And so if you look at the extent of the wet tropics lowland rainforest here there's a big patch up the daintry which is still really important but south of that you find that they're stuck on the coastal ranges. There are nine distinct populations along the coastal ranges. Studies have been done into each of those populations and the numbers of cassowaries in each and basically given them all a timeline for when inbreeding or whatever else will cause the local extinction of each of those groups. The Mission Beach area is probably one of the more extensive and certainly the highest density populations of cassowaries and it's really important that it not be allowed to die out if we can link it up to other populations and especially with that main area to the west that really increases its chances of survival. It's long been recognised that the Mission Beach area is isolated from the main world heritage areas to the west by the highway, by the main rail line by various other cleared agricultural country. An important area where there's been less clearing is in the so-called Smiths Gap area where you've got National Park to the east and to the west because there's at least forest on both sides we could see there was a chance of some sort of linking that could be done there. We're working with National Parks people to get all of the National Parks areas fully planted for a start and then a property next door to the National Park became available for sale and so at that point we said let's work again with Queensland Trust for Nature and buy that block of land. Okay well this is the starting point of this project as you can see it says Gurbam which is the name the local Aboriginal name for the Emerald Dove that's the Jiru and Gilnai tribal group name and it happens to be the same word with both language groups so we decided to call it that. It forms a critical corridor this bit of land it's 17 hectares and it's between World Heritage Area and National Park on either side of the Bruce Highway and this forms the missing link that will make a continuous forest all the way through. The strategic location is too important for it to be purchased by somebody who wants to turn it back into bananas or cattle or some other agricultural pursuit which reduces the capacity of cassaries to walk through. Wherever cassaries are able to move to and fro also all the other wildlife the wallabies and the bandicoots and the other birds are all able to enjoy and forage and find nesting sites and food. It was originally cattle it may have been cane at some stage but it was immediately before we bought it it was bananas and of course the banana farmer did not want cassaries on his block because they eat the bananas but worse than that the workers used to turn up with their dogs and the dogs would roam around on the block through the day so it was a really effective block to cassary movement in that area. Having purchased it one of the main things about Queensland Trust for Nature is that they want to turn it into a nature refuge and so we are currently working with them to revegetate almost all of the cleared country turn it back into forest make it so that the cassaries can use it and we know the cassaries do use it because we see them occasionally as we're working out there. It began here in May last year and so far we've planted probably about one hectare and we're incrementally going further up the hill and over against the existing National Park over the other side there. These existing trees here were planted about 25 years ago as a revegetation project the forest up there, that's all National Park part of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area and so we'll be going right up to the existing forest. Across to the south west we'll be planting up against the National Park there so this will form a complete solid forest area. An ecologist called Norman Myers once described Tropical Rainforest as the greatest celebration of life on earth and you can see why. If you look through here and you can see this creek it's 10 metres below and the vines and ferns and everything climbing over each other to get up to the light and then going up the mountainside through the gap you can see the forest just clambering up over the mountain all the plants fighting to get their share of the light. That's the Wait awhile it sends up shoots that have backward pointing barbs on them and they hook onto the foliage of other trees and keep growing and growing and growing until they get up to the light and some of those canes that they produce can be 60 metres long as they find their way up through the forest to get into the light and if you walk through underneath them where they're hanging down they're very painful they just grab hold of you like fish hooks which is why they call it Wait awhile because you're walking through the forest you get caught up on them you have to wait awhile while you unpick them so you can get out. This is the northern section of the block we'll be replanting this in the next year by re-vegetating it from the road down there up to the railway and then we'll move further up the hill here because we've got seven hectares to cover all together. The important part of our casserie management plan is to reduce losses of casseries. One of the things that C4 currently is doing is that we are involved with the day-to-day management of the Garnes Beach Casserie Recovery Facility. I'm Mandy and I'm a volunteer with C4 so I volunteered in the nursery originally and then I had the opportunity to come here at the Casserie Rehab Centre each morning we come down and pick the chicks and give them medication if they need it and if they need to be fed again in the afternoon we do that here as well so we're just basically at the place where they hopefully get looked after and rehabilitated back into the wild. It's not a zoo, it's a really important part that we try to minimise the personal contact with the birds just to give them the medications that they need and more importantly the food that they need so they can grow well enough so they can actually get back out into the wild. So this morning's breakfast and I'm surprised we're not being stalked by the birds because they know when breakfast is coming. Each morning they get a fair whack of food they're pretty hungry so they'll get a nice mixture of whatever fruit we can get a hold of. No citrus but they love their bananas. So we've got Bobby and Golly in at the moment they're two quite young cassaries Bobby I believe is from Wongaling Beach and he or she, I'm not sure what sex it is I don't think they can figure out which sex it is yet but yeah he was hit by a car or the poor lady who hit it obviously felt terrible, she gathered it up took it to the vets, it ended up here it was done, couldn't be reunited with its father so it's coming to care here Golly is from up in the Daintree area and he was just lagging behind the parent bird so obviously I think he had some kind of injury to his foot they've been put together in one of the pens here and they're getting along fabulously it's so good to see they're very happy birds. One of our major activities here and a really good opportunity for people to be involved is the nursery you see the nursery, we've got over 10,000 native plants we believe that people should live with wildlife and that an important part of living with wildlife is that you have native plants in your garden if you've got native plants in your garden then that means that's the food for the things which should live here it's the flowers that feeds the butterflies, the beetles all the other insects it's the fruit that feeds the birds including the cassavares it's living with your wildlife rather than having the wildlife as something separate that lives outside your fence so we have our nursery for local people to come and buy native species also by having so many plants here that's our stock that we use in our revegetation my name and we're here at Gerbom Reserve in tropical north Queensland, Australia highly important in this area this particular spot here is enhancing the habitat as you can see in the background here we've got World Heritage National Park and where we're planting today with C4 is extending the habitat for southern cassowary and as well as many other native Australian fauna species great today C4's had some great volunteers turn up a good crowd actually we're doing this to engage the community create awareness it's all about getting people together so great day overall looks like we'll have about at least 300 native trees planted so great outcome what would you like to say to people who are interested in getting involved? just come and we'll show you how to do it it's easy we've had a couple of really important purchases the first major one was what's called Lot 66 well Lot 66 or as we call it now a cassowary connection it started off more than 15 years ago when a developer put an application into the then Shire Council for a development of this 25 hectares with 55 housing lots when the application was made we opposed it but it was granted by the council we realised that it was in a critical spot because it was going to sever a connection between continuous areas of forest even though it was rejected we teamed up with others and Terrain Natural Resource Management commissioned an ecologist to do a mapping of the wildlife corridors through this area which was done and we had that document and presented that to the then Minister for Environment Peter Garrett he reviewed the application and said that with that information there was no way he could allow that development to go ahead so it was back to the developer who then had the option of coming up with a plan of less intrusive development and so they were talking about doing 20 lots or 10 lots or something which made it of doubtful economic value but in the meantime we raised money over a period of years we raised a quarter of a million dollars and we were able to put that together with money from the Queensland Trust for Nature and as a partnership we bought the block since then we've improved it and we've been able to secure wildlife refuge status for that area which is on the title and so it can never be changed and so now it's available for sale to somebody who wants to have a property where there's lots of birds lots of wildlife, lots of trees nice habitat and enjoy that patch of secure habitat Since I was a kid I've always been interested in nature we lived in a bit of countryside that was near a river and there was always some native animals around sure it was the birds, we knew about native birds but it was also echidnas, snakes, bandicoots all sorts of things that you just took for granted as being part of your environment but as the suburbs encroached more and more around us those things that we took for granted just disappeared and you didn't realise at first that they were gone until you say haven't seen one for a long time chances of seeing one now, not high so you actually have to consciously recognise what wildlife that you have and what you need to do to keep it otherwise it will just slip away it's just so easy for things to disappear before you realise C4 is an organisation that is dedicated to try and maintain the very attractions that bring us all to live here a lot of people come here and want to develop, develop, develop and destroy the very things that make people want to come here but we find that people come to our environment centre at Mission Beach and one of the first questions that they have is where can I see a casserole in the wild that's the number one thing they want to do that's our heritage, that's our wildlife I mean Australia is very different from other parts of the world because it's been isolated for so long and we have a fairly small area of rainforest in Australia and it's so easy for people to just again take it for granted, little bit by little bit the forest is being pushed back in the early days the pine issues say turn your back and the forest will grow up behind you well it's not quite as simple as that now something might grow up behind you but it's more like it'll be weeds than it is to be forest we are the stewards of this land we do need to take responsibility for looking after it well humanity is not the be all and end all on this planet and it is our responsibility as custodians whilst we're on this planet to look after nature we cannot function without it there is no separation between us and the natural world and the more we separate the less there is for us as human beings look at what it does, it's amazing it nurtures us, it gives us everything this is a wonderful area for exploring the wildlife and the natural habitat because there is so much happening the enormous diversity of plant and animal species I think people around the world are more aware now than years past of the value of natural habitat we're seeing quite a lot of support for what we do and I think we are effective in steering the juggernaut of human development into safer ways we try to share the things we value with others who may not be even aware of what is here and by doing so we believe that people will discover and thereby respect and want to protect and preserve I think more and more people are getting on board with it I think there are a lot of people who don't know how to connect and do something but they don't know how to get involved valuing wildlife is actually part of your everyday life everything in the way you live has to take into account that wildlife needs to live here too you have water in your yard so that the birds have got somewhere to live you have the native trees because they provide the flowers and fruit for all the different types of wildlife that when you wake up in the morning you go out in the verandah you expect that you'll see native animals around it doesn't have to be I mean they don't have to come in your castoraries every morning or anything like that it's just those incremental small things that people can do and collectively that adds up to quite a big difference one of the other statements that has inspired me is no one makes a greater mistake than he who does nothing because he thought he could only do a little the reality is that every one of those little bits combined makes a big difference if I wasn't hopeful for the future of wildlife in the world why would I spend almost every day of my life continuing to do this sort of thing I'm doing it because I think that mankind is actually better than what they give themselves credit for it's all the other people at C4 who all come in because they all can see that there's a role that they can play in looking after wildlife in making the whole place better come out or go to a nursery near you or get involved in any other kind of conservation effort it doesn't have to be one out here in the bush where you're planting there's all sorts of things that you can do to help the effort we'd love to have your help we need a lot of help because there is always more jobs than we can do in the time available we welcome volunteers with open arms and the other side of that is that we, like everybody else who joins learn a lot of things because we have an enormous range of talented informed people who are very willing to share their knowledge and so by working together and sharing all that knowledge it's just such an enriching experience